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North America’s racist ban on Chinese immigration is an urgent history lesson

So after picking him up from his Scarborough nursing home, I packed his wheelchair in the car and drove him to the Chinese restaurant across the street.

North America’s racist ban on Chinese immigration is an urgent history lesson that pushed Tony Wong, Toronto Star's television critic, to put his family in the spotlight.

At which point he found himself surrounded by media eager to hear his story: Shack Mack, born in 1909, arrived in Canada at the age of 13 and paid a $500 head tax to enter the country.

Mack was my wife Sharon’s grandfather and a chief plaintiff in a landmark case against the federal government over the exclusionary Chinese Immigration Act.

This was the first news conference for media to hear from a survivor who had launched a class-action lawsuit against the government. But, at this moment, all he wanted was dim sum.

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The painfully shy, soft-spoken Mack, who died in 2003, absolutely hated being the centre of attention. Press conferences were not his thing. But he knew this was important. After paying the head tax he was held in the notorious “pig pen” detention centre in Victoria, B.C. He would eventually open a string of cafes across the Prairies. But it was a harsh life.

The law, it turned out, didn’t agree with him. He died a month before the Supreme Court of Canada turned down the appeal of his case, which had been dismissed in Superior Court because it sought to apply “modern-day constitutional principles” to a law repealed half a century ago. But he was on the right side of history. It paved the way for a historic apology from then prime minister Stephen Harper in 2006.

It’s a significant and timely look at the American version of the act. It was an eye-opener for me because, while I knew a lot about the Canadian experience, I didn’t know the historical context of the American legislation.

And the issue of immigration is, of course, highly topical when you have a sitting U.S. president wanting to build a wall across the Mexican border and lamenting that there is too much immigration from “shithole countries.” It’s not hard to draw a line between the inflammatory rhetoric used about Haiti and Africa today and the language and reasoning used to pass a deeply racist act more than a century ago.

A young Shack Jang Mack in an undated photo. (Courtesy Sharon Lem)

“This is not an immigration story. This is the immigration story of America,” director Ric Burns told the Television Critics Association conference in Los Angeles earlier this year. “It is the most important story most Americans, including me until recently, really didn’t know about.”

The American exclusion act spanned 61 years. Astonishingly, it would be revisited and resigned by the sitting government every 10 years. Shortly after the American act was imposed in 1882, Canada would impose a head tax on Chinese immigrants.

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It’s hard to imagine that Canada, which has become a beacon of hope in today’s polarized world, was once dedicated to building walls. The Chinese were the only ethnic group forced to pay a head tax. Between 1885 and 1923, more than 81,000 Chinese migrants paid $23 million in tax, which would be billions of dollars today.

When the tax didn’t completely stop the flow of Chinese, Canada implemented its own version of the Exclusion Act in 1923, which would remain in effect until 1947.

When the American act was finally repealed, it wasn’t so much because of internal pressure but because of the Second World War. The Japanese, at war with the U.S., launched a morally compelling propaganda effort aimed at China, pointing out that while the U.S. and China were “allies” during the war, Chinese people couldn’t immigrate to the U.S. because of racist legislation. The act was repealed in 1943. But even that was a minor victory, since only 105 ethnic Chinese were allowed into the country that year. But it did establish a beachhead.

“The story of Chinese coming to America and the story of their exclusion is a red thread through the history of the struggle over how do we define who can be American,” says Burns. “We felt a deep moral urgency to tell the story.”

The act ended up institutionalizing racism and paved the way for violence against Chinese for decades. That included lynchings, the burning of Chinatowns across the country and several massacres of Chinese miners.

But it also sparked the beginnings of a growing politicization and awareness within the Chinese community, as they sought redress within the law with more than 10,000 suits filed over that period.

There was, for example, no definition of what constituted American citizenship until a second generation Chinese-American, Wong Kim Ark, who was prevented from returning to the U.S. after visiting China, took his case to the Supreme Court. In a case that is now taught in just about every North American immigration law class, the court ruled that if you are born in the United States then you are an American citizen. It’s also still relevant, since the 14th Amendment on which it is based is being challenged and politicized today in attempts to deny citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants.

North of the border, Chinese Canadians like Mack also took to the courts for redress. Grandpa’s landmark case would inspire a remarkable book dedicated to him and co-edited by then-University of Toronto law school dean Mayo Moran, a collection of essays looking at the legal and philosophical issues raised by trying to come to terms with historic wrongs. It is a thoughtful, troubling look at why we must call power to account.

That is also the unstated thesis of PBS’s The Chinese Exclusion Act.

At two hours, the documentary feels more like a snack than a meal — at least it does for seven-time Emmy Award-winning director Burns, the younger brother of documentarian Ken Burns. They’re both known for producing documentaries that are epic in scope and length. The two collaborated on the PBS series The Civil War (1990).

There are signature Burns flourishes in the doc, including painstaking research and sweeping historical footage. There is a lot to chronicle. But it suffers from a surfeit of talking heads in an effort to get to the next factoid. There is little introspection or personal perspective from survivors or descendants of those affected by the Exclusion Act and what it might all mean in a more personal context.

But it does provide some insight into the minds of those who might want to build more walls. Yesterday, the target was the Chinese. Today, the Mexicans and Muslims. Tomorrow, who knows? History is doomed to repeat in a society where the past is still not digested and introspection is drowned by the clamour from those who hate.

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